“Tell me one thing, will you?”
“What?”
“Where do you go on your days off?”
“Here and there.”
“Jesus Christ.” Smyley rubbed his big belly and glanced down at Mackenzie’s feet. “Nice old dog. She got a name?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she did at one time.”
Smyley got into the Jeep. “Somebody was telling me-did you used to be a doctor or something? Psychiatrist, they said.”
“Yes.”
“What the hell are you doing up here then?”
“My job.” Mackenzie watched him shake his head in disgust and drive away. Then he went inside the cabin and unpacked the supplies. He gave the dog a Milk Bone and went up the ladder into the tower and did a binocular sweep of the mountain forests. He recorded the sweep in the log and checked the radio, broke open the new decks of cards and laid out a double-pack board of solitaire.
The newspaper story kept intruding on his contentment. Finally he climbed down to the cabin and read the story again.
The dog heaved herself on ancient limbs to the larder and he gave her another Milk Bone. She didn’t eat it. She took it outside, perhaps to bury it.
Once every three weeks I see a newspaper, he thought, and I had to pick this one. Odds of twenty to one.
He read it twice. Duggai was a sort of bad tooth that Mackenzie seemed compelled to keep biting and prodding with his tongue.
He went outside and the dog brought him a stick; Mackenzie spent ten minutes throwing it for the dog to fetch; the dog was too old to do more than trot after it. Afterward MacKenzie went back up to the tower, moving up the ladder with a grace that betrayed quite well-tuned muscular coordination for a physique barely shy of fifty years’ age. It was just about all he had to do-calisthenics and isometrics. Otherwise sedentary in the fire tower he’d have gone to atrophy-constant head colds and bellyaches like Wilder or flaccid fat like Smyley, the relief man. Smyley was a reader; doing the circuit from tower to tower he always had his knapsack filled with paperbacks. Wilder was a deep thinker who worried a great deal about ecology and the world; with nothing to do in the towers but worry about Armageddon it wasn’t surprising Wilder had heartburn and sinus trouble. And me? I just get musclebound-in body and mind.
Nevertheless he never could wait to get back to his isolated cocoon after a weekend’s liberty. It was the frantic impulse toward his safe hermitage that always brought him home at top speed in the Jeep.
He still had the Sacramento newspaper; he tossed it on the desk and did a sweep of the mountains, searching through the glasses in a deliberate grid pattern until he’d completed the circuit. Down at the foot of the tower the dog was excavating to bury the Milk Bone at the foot of one of the stilts that supported the rickety fire tower. Mackenzie leaned out over the railing. “You’re digging so close you’ll knock the whole thing over, you stupid twirp.” The dog wagged her tail briefly to acknowledge she knew he was talking to her. Mackenzie went back inside the glass enclosure and down with the newspaper.
KILLER SOUGHT AFTER ASYLUM ESCAPE
In making his escape Duggai apparently tunneled through a second-story exterior wall and climbed over a 12 -foot steel fence.
Dogs employed in the search failed to trace Duggai because of Tuesday night’s heavy rain, which had washed the spoor away by the time the escape was discovered yesterday morning.
According to Highway Patrol Lt. Richard Loomiston, Duggai allegedly broke into a house one mile from the prison hospital before dawn Wednesday. He may have stolen guns as well as clothing and food from the house. Duggai’s fingerprints were found on several objects in the house, which has been unoccupied for several days, its owners vacationing.
Lt. Loomiston stated that all leads are being pursued. A dark brown camper-body pickup truck, California license plates XVZ237W, was stolen at some time before dawn from a residence on the outskirts of Cochino, and the theft may be connected with Duggai’s disappearance.
Police are emphasizing that if seen, Duggai should not be approached. “He is extremely dangerous and may be armed. Anyone having information about his whereabouts should immediately call local police or the Highway Patrol,” Lt. Loomiston said.
Calvin Duggai is described by police as a Navajo Indian, height 6? 1? weight 205 pounds. Hair black, eyes brown, complexion swarthy. The fugitive has a three-inch scar on the back of his left hand extending from the wrist to the center knuckle.
Tracks left in the wet ground at the hospital indicate that Duggai may be limping as a result of his leap to freedom. Color and description of his clothing are unknown pending the return of the householders from whose wardrobe it was stolen.
In 1971 Calvin Duggai, a Vietnam combat veteran, was arrested and charged in Barstow after five men died in the Mohave Desert collecting spent shells on the Randsburg Wash Test Range during the Independence Day weekend.
Tire tracks and other evidence led police to Duggai’s Barstow shack, where his pickup truck still contained 17 buckets filled with empty brass cartridge cases.
According to evidence presented at Duggai’s trial, the six men-described as “scavengers”-had driven into the restricted Randsburg Wash range in the pickup for the purpose of collecting shell casings ejected from Air Force planes during gunnery practice. Such brass casings can be sold to scrap dealers for 55? a pound.
For several months prior to the incident, Duggai allegedly had operated similar scavenger hunts on various artillery and gunnery ranges throughout the Southwest.
During the hunt for brass in the desert, an altercation apparently occurred among the scavengers, after which Duggai drove away in the pickup truck, abandoning the five men in a desert area about 40 miles from the nearest road. The high recorded for July 3 was 123° Fahrenheit, and in his summation San Bernardino County Prosecutor Everett Sellas pointed out, “Those temperatures are measured at the weather station in the shade, and in the middle of the Mohave Desert there is no shade.”
Tracks indicated the five victims tried to walk out of the desert. Four of them managed to cross about 5? miles.
The fifth victim, Gilbert Rodriguez, 15, of Victorville, made his way several miles farther, surviving the first night by breaking open cactus with rocks and squeezing the pulp through his shirt. The desert heat claimed him before noon of the following day.
The five bodies were found by an Air Force helicopter after Mrs. Carlos Rodriguez of Victorville called police to say her son had not returned from a brass-collecting expedition led by Calvin Duggai.
In testimony at Duggai’s trial, San Bernardino County Medical Examiner Dr. Philip Rawson stated that when the bodies were found, “They’d been picked fairly clean by buzzards and ants but we were able to piece the story together. Life expectancy in that desert is extremely brief, even for a healthy adult, if he isn’t a trained expert in the techniques of survival. People’s cars break down out there, they make the mistake of trying to walk out for help, and quite often they’re dead in just a few hours.”
Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are blamed for most summer desert fatalities of this kind. Dr. Rawson stated, “The blood almost literally comes to a boil.”
It was established at the trial that Duggai had deliberately abandoned the five men without water.
In the absence of clear evidence of motive, Duggai was charged with five counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of the five scavengers.
Rumors that Duggai’s motives involved Indian witchcraft and intertribal rivalry led Duggai’s court-appointed
